Adventure Site Contest 3: Albarino’s Icy Cellar

​Written by Zoranu
For AD&D, levels 6-8
White Dragon Lair
A white dragon raids the foothills. Rumor says it lairs in an ancient, icy dwarf ruin in the mountains.      
   One of my favorite parts of DRAGON LAIRS is how they always tend to have intense environmental effects added in. Red dragons love volcanoes (or in last year’s case, a volcanic steam geyser), black dragons have acidic swamps…blues and greens are nice and distinct with desert/woodland, although that’s harder to evoke “lair” from. But WHITE DRAGONS, now THEY are peak for lair environments. You roll up to a white dragon, you know you’re getting an ICE FORTRESS. Evocative as all get-out.
   This one is an abandoned Dwarf Fortress, notably the kind where they all went a little crazy, ran out of booze, and died off, leaving the place to demons and derro. And, apparently, a white dragon, the titular Albarino. You know how this story goes, go raid the dragon and have fun.
   So, this map. Hand-drawn in a charming style, but sadly not stapled to the document. Key 1 is the icy entry. 2 is the secret door to not killing yourself. 3 is the white dragon on top of his massive hoard. Kind of wild how the whole thing could be two rooms (1 and 3) and then the big bossfight, if the party did their intelligence-gathering and loaded for a white dragon fight, then they could quite conceivably summon him just by the noise of breaking down the door, making the rest of the complex kind of a letdown. Which would be a bummer, because the rest of the fortress is pretty well-designed for dungeon crawling. It’s not aggressively loopy, but there are some alternate routes and the broken-wall ingress point is honestly more likely the one that gets used. The actual “final boss” is the lower section (helpfully highlighted in purple) where a shadow demon lurks, a linear final march that really conveys a sense of dread while they walk in, sometimes linearity is its own design consideration. Probably a little big for a single session, but pretty funny how short it could practically be.

   You’re heading up to a white dragon’s lair, you know what hazards await. Slips, falls, bitter cold. Actually that’s mostly in the dragon’s tiny little section, most of the rest is pretty low-trap. Don’t eat the rotten food, dummy.
   Fights aren’t dense but beyond the WHITE DRAGON most are pretty mild, just derro-and-friends until you get into the bottom level with shadows and a nasty demon that stops your cleric from turning the shadows while he’s still alive. THAT is a nasty kick in the jibblies, nice. Derros have good tactics and do have a few extra-powerful bruiser types and the occasional spellcaster; loaded up with cloudkill and a couple lightning bolts, that fella can tag PCs even at this level. One mixed boon/bane/monsterfight is a Dao in an iron flask at the end who pretends to be benevolent and wish-capable but only manages limited wishes and will attack parties if they’re weak-looking. Neat. No strict random encounter table here, but there’s a very solid order-of-battle notes section for how the dragon and the derro react. Derro might be convinced to fight the dragon, but they’re treacherous little monsters of course.
   As is only right and proper, treasure here is stratospheric. Level 6 given as the floor feels slightly ludicrous, with near half a million just in cash, plus scrolls, wands, trinkets, magic weapons, magic armor (most dwarf-sized, a few cursed), etc. I’m particularly tickled by the adventure slyly noting “subdued dragon =2.5 mil gp”. Oh you card. Most of the treasure is in bar form, so there’s less of a “how to we get a U-haul up here” discussion than normal, but its still a very bulky setup. Need to kill everything in here before you can steal it all.
   You better believe I’m going to put this sucker in my campaign. I’m not listening to the level range and I do not believe this will be a single session even with all the empty rooms, but it’s still really cool. Plus, it’s a DRAGON LAIR.